


A Duty Always Known

by vials



Category: London Spy
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 04:46:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10891989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: When Danny first walked into the bar that first night, Scottie knew deep down he would be in for the long haul. Now, driving across London after a hysterical phone call from Danny, he's realising just what his duty to Danny really means.





	A Duty Always Known

Scottie hadn’t expected to have this much responsibility this late in life. He had obviously known he would never be a parent, and that had been as far as his mind had taken him when he had been imagining potential scenarios where he might end up caring for somebody. After he had passed through his middle ages with no children (of course) and no husband (of course), he had thought he was in the clear.

That had been before nineteen-year-old Daniel Edward Holt had walked into his life, and something about him had tuned Scottie in to the fact that this young man was probably going to become a regular face. Just what that would entail Scottie didn’t know, but now, driving rapidly through the deserted streets of very early morning London, he thought he had some idea.

He was worried about him, for a start. And not in the same way that he was concerned when friends of his would have troubles here and there, with money or jobs or boyfriends. No, it was a worry that surpassed that; the kind of worry that could only come from late night phone calls that woke one from sleep. Nothing good had ever come of an early morning phone call, and that was an opinion that Scottie would stick with. 

Danny had sounded distraught on the phone. Truth be told, Scottie still didn’t know what the young man had been calling him for. Danny had been too hysterical to tell him anything coherent – the only thing that Scottie could decipher from the whole mess was that Danny was in trouble, he was probably hurt, and he needed help. Scottie had told him to call an ambulance and he would try to catch up to him before it got there, but something told him that Danny wouldn’t have taken that advice on board. He had seemed incapable of doing anything but cry.

Boy trouble, Scottie thought. It was probably going to be boy trouble, because Scottie could tell at a glance the kind of boys who were always going to have it. Danny was pretty and delicate and above all a hopeless romantic, and Scottie knew all too well that there were no ends of men out there who loved to take things as pretty as Danny and break them. Danny would fall for it time and time again, of course, and Scottie would be there to pick up the pieces. He had no idea where the thought had come from, fully formed and presenting itself like a duty he had always known, deep down, was his, but there it was and here Scottie was, foot to the floor as much as he could get away with in a built up area, driving into the night to the rescue of some boy he had met probably five weeks ago, at a push. 

Danny had told Scottie where he had lived in passing conversation and Scottie’s mind was still sharp in his old age. He remembered the address down to the postcode – given because Scottie had, for some reason, insisted on sending some groceries around in a delivery just until Danny wrestled his pay cheque off the latest bastard he was doing work for – but they had never mentioned it again and Danny hadn’t given him the address on the phone. Scottie wondered if Danny worried he had let him down, if he was wondering how Scottie could possibly promise to come over right away when he didn’t even know his address. He thought he was probably being too sensitive – Danny had his own issues right now, clearly, and probably hadn’t even considered it. Besides, it didn’t matter. He was coming, and as a matter of fact, he was here now.

Scottie pulled the car up half on the pavement and climbed out, hurrying over to the building that was supposed to be a set of flats but looked more like a death trap. The entrance was sandwiched between two shops – a small grocery store on one side, graffiti sprayed over its windows, the security shutters only pulled down halfway and covered in graffiti themselves, and one of those seemingly pop-up mobile phone stores on the other, selling cheap cases and accessories and promising to fix a cracked iPhone screen for fifty quid, bargain, swear it. The entrance to the stairwell reeked of piss and Scottie noticed several used needles discarded down by the bins. He pulled a face and stepped carefully up to the stone stairs, pulling himself up a flight without daring to touch the bannister before the faint glow of a streetlamp managed to light the rest of the way through a milky-paned window in the hallway. Scottie hoped that whatever was wrong, Danny would be willing to come with him. He didn’t want his car sitting out there for too long.

He got to Danny’s door, one of two small flats with the doors facing opposite one another. He rapped quickly on the faded paint and then pulled his hand back as though he were worried about what would happen if he touched it for too long. He had no idea how Danny could stand to live in such a place, though as far as he was aware the man had no choice. He had received the life story from Danny quite early on – parents not in the picture, not a lot of money, trying to get on his feet. Scottie gathered at least some of the problems with his parents were because Danny was gay, but he also got the distinct feeling that Danny’s sexuality had merely been the final straw, and there had been a lot of problems before that. Danny wore the evidence on his face as clearly as he wore the rest of his emotions – nobody with a healthy family life would fall in love so easily and as recklessly as Danny.

The door still hadn’t been opened, and so Scottie risked another knock. When there was still silence, he muttered a curse under his breath and, throwing manners to the wind, tried the door. He had thought it would be unlocked, come to think of it; it had the feeling of a door that was unlocked. Probably something left over from his days of more glamourous employment, Scottie thought, because he could always tell unlocked doors when he saw them. He pushed down the handle and creaked the door open, leaning into the dark flat beyond.

“Danny?” he called, softly at first. “Danny. Are you in here?”

The flat was eerily still, but after pausing for a moment and listening to the darkness Scottie confirmed it wasn’t the stillness that came from somebody trying not to be caught. It was the stillness that came from somebody genuinely unaware of his presence, which was a different matter entirely and overall much easier to deal with. Scottie stepped inside and reached behind him, swinging the door shut and twisting the lock. The place seemed like the kind of area where somebody might try and follow him up here, what with his age not exactly being an intimidating deterrent, but looking around as his eyes adjusted to the light he thought that there wouldn’t be much worth stealing up here. The hallway he was standing in was bare, and the little light filtering in through the bathroom didn’t light up much in there, either.

Following his instinct, Scottie edged down the hallway. There was someone in here, he knew, and he of course that person was Danny, and nobody else to be worried about. Why Danny should call him so hysterical and then be so unresponsive now was a question that Scottie couldn’t answer, but he pushed away his rising fears and focused instead on the immediate issue, which was finding Danny in a flat that was almost pitch black even for somebody with much younger eyes than Scottie’s.

“Danny!” he called again, a little louder this time. “It’s Scottie. Where are you?”

Still nothing, and Scottie began to prepare himself for the worst. He would find Danny murdered by one of the men he had been thinking about earlier, he would find him dead from some awful accident, he would find him dead from a drug overdose. Scottie reached the only bedroom in the flat and wrinkled his nose. Evidently the boy trouble option was the most likely, and he thought he was probably lucky he hadn’t interrupted anything.

“Danny?” Scottie asked, just in case. “I’m going to turn the light on – if it works.”

He half expected the place to be so dark because Danny had had the electricity cut off again, but to his surprise the light switched on fine. His eyes took a second to adjust, and then he was left with the sight that would end up forever imprinted in some corner of his brain, no matter how many times he tried to forget about it.

Danny was sitting on his bed, pushed up into the far corner with his arms wrapped around his knees. He was wide-eyed and shivering with cold, which was unsurprising because the flat was freezing and Danny was wearing no clothing. Scottie took a hesitant step forward and realised that what he had initially thought had been odd shadows were actually bruises and smears of blood; the closer he got to Danny the more he realised he was covered in them. One of his wrists was bleeding badly from a small but deep cut to the side of it, and the other wrist still bore evidence of the culprit – zip ties, one still attached to his wrist and visibly digging in, the other one snapped but still trapped under the first. Danny’s neck was covered in hickeys, some of them dark purple and undoubtedly painful; his sides and hips were covered with scratch marks and half-crescents from fingernails, some of them bleeding. On his right thigh, Scottie could see a bite mark.

“Christ,” Scottie said quietly, and then he sighed. “Oh, Danny.”

Danny looked at him, his eyes glistening, and looked as though he were about to say something. Finally he shook his head, blinking away tears, and Scottie gave him a small, sympathetic smile.

“You don’t have to tell me right now,” he said. “Do you want me to call the police?”

“No!” Danny’s voice sounded hoarse. Unsurprising, considering all the crying and screaming he had been doing earlier. “No, Scottie, please –”

“It’s alright, I won’t call them if you don’t want me to. I just thought I would ask, in case you didn’t want to make the call yourself. I’ll find you some clothes. Are you seriously hurt? As in, is anything broken? Anything internal we have to worry about?”

Danny shook his head miserably, and promptly started crying again.

“Come, now,” Scottie said, gently but firmly. “Don’t work yourself up again. You’ll be fine. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you will be.”

“You don’t – _understand_ ,” Danny said, between sobs. He was crying so hard that it made his entire body tremble; Scottie was worried he would hurt himself further, crying like that in his state. “I was s-so _stupid_ –”

“It’s not your fault, Danny,” Scottie told him, his voice just plain firm now. “Don’t start going down that road. There are some sick bastards out there. You can’t start blaming yourself because they’re wrong in the head.”

“But it – _is_ my fault,” Danny said, bringing his hands up to his face. With his face pressed against them and his voice muffled, Scottie had to take a step closer to work out what he was saying. “I _asked_ them to. I _invited_ it, I don’t know what I was t-thinking but I thought it would be a g-good idea, you know? I felt so lonely and I thought it would just be fun to _feel_ something, something I h-hadn’t felt before, so I just wrote the ad without thinking and I didn’t realise people would actually t-take me up on it, I didn’t think _anything_ because I’m a fucking idiot!”

He collapsed into sobs again, leaving Scottie standing there with one of Danny’s t-shirts folded over his arm, staring at the shaking pile in front of him in confusion.

“You mean you _asked_ somebody to do this to you?” he asked. It was strange, he supposed, but not the first time he had heard of something like this. He hadn’t quite expected it from Danny, putting him down to be too much into romantic connections for that, but he supposed you could never really know everything about everyone. 

“Not t- _this_ exactly,” Danny said, in moment between sobs. “I said they could do anything, so long as they didn’t talk to me – I thought it would be better that way, if they didn’t speak, but it was – it was _awful_ –”

“Calm down, Danny,” Scottie told him, beginning to worry. Danny’s words were jumbling together, his breaths growing more uneven and ragged.

“I was such an idiot! I t-thought it would be just a game, I didn’t think it would all be so real, or that there would be so m-many!”

“You really need to calm down before you tell me anything more, Danny,” Scottie said, but by then it was too late. Danny was practically collapsed in on himself, his hands tugging at his hair now, his eyes squeezed shut. He was rocking back and forth, his breathing turning from ragged, irregular breaths to desperate gasps.

“Scottie –”

“Breathe, Danny.”

“I can’t breathe – I can’t –”

“Yes you can. If you’re talking, you’re breathing. If you’re conscious, you’re breathing. Concentrate.”

Danny was wheezing by now, and Scottie was concerned he would pass out. He hoped the breathing issues were just born of panic and not anything Danny might have taken that night; if it was, Scottie was going to have a hard time getting the information out of Danny.

“Breathe in, hold it, breath out, hold it,” Scottie said gently. “Two seconds each. It’ll work quickly, trust me.”

Danny managed a nod, but it was almost another minute until he managed to slow his breathing down, and even then Scottie could hear he was on the verge of hyperventilating again. He didn’t say anything, not wanting to distract him, and instead went back to gathering his clothes. By the time Danny seemed to have come back into himself, Scottie had placed the clothes on the bed beside him, and Danny stared at them for a moment as though he had forgotten what they were for. Finally, stiffly, he began pulling them on; Scottie busied himself with gathering some extra clothing so Danny could have some privacy. He waited until the shuffling had stopped before he turned around, seeing Danny sitting on the edge of the bed now, still hunched over himself and sniffling.

“I’m going to have to ask you an unpleasant question, Danny,” Scottie said, and Danny looked up at him, exhausted. “I don’t particularly want to drag this on any longer than necessary, but I do need to know.”

“What?” Danny asked, his voice hoarse. Scottie saw him swallow and wince slightly.

“Were you safe? Did you use any protection?”

Danny stared at him for a long moment. With mounting despair, Scottie realised before Danny could speak that it hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Please tell me you were careful,” Scottie said, though he knew it was no good. 

“No,” Danny eventually whispered. “No, I didn’t – I’ve only been with boyfriends before, I didn’t think – oh my god, I didn’t even _think_ –”

He was growing panicked again; Scottie could hear it in his breath. He wasn’t the only one. Scottie’s throat suddenly felt dry, and he shook his head as though he could shake all the mounting panic away.

“We need to take you to a hospital,” he said, and Danny looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Don’t protest. I won’t hear it. If we get you to a doctor now there could still be a chance, should the worst have happened. Come on, get the rest of your things. Whatever you want to bring. You can stay with me for a while.”

Danny looked as though he would rather do anything than go to the hospital, but at Scottie’s words he dragged himself to his feet, hobbling and wincing as he moved across the room. Scottie noticed the zip tie still attached to his wrist and made a mental note to stop by the kitchen to look for something sharp.

“Oh, Danny,” he said, quietly, and saw Danny’s shoulders tense slightly. Neither of them said anything more.


End file.
